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Evans: Lions and grizzlies and sharks -- big deal

By Clay Evans

Posted:
09/15/2013 01:00:00 AM MDT

I t's that time of year when Colorado wildlife officials start killing "problem" bears who meander into Boulder's city limits. Last week rangers "euthanized" two black bears: a nearly 600-pound male who had been relocated to Wyoming in 2008; and a 200-pound male whose presence spurred a lockdown at nearby Flatiron Elementary School.

The first ran afoul of Colorado Parks and Wildlife's "two strikes" policy, which mandates a minimum sentence of death for a bear that has been tagged and removed once before. The smaller bear was killed because "it wouldn't head back to the foothills west of town," a CPW spokeswoman told the Daily Camera. Sounds like someone got lazy.

In nature-loving Boulder, many citizens object to reflexive predator killing -- and others instantly respond along lines of, "Well, you'll be sorry when a bear/lion/rabid skunk eats a kid!"

Count me in the former category. In a myth-haunted culture bent on exterminating predators, no matter the environmental cost, our fears are wildly at odds with reality.

So, what's the likelihood that a black bear (brown bears, aka grizzlies, sadly no longer live in Colorado) will attack or kill someone? A few tidbits from GrizzlyBay.org, a conservation organization focused on Alaska's Katmai National Park:

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In the United States, one in 16,000 people commit murder. By comparison, one grizzly in 50,000 and one black bear in a million kills a human. An estimated 750,000 black bears in North America kill less than a single human every year.

For every person killed by a black bear, 13 are killed by rattlesnakes, 17 by spiders, 150 by tornadoes, 374 by lightning and -- oopsie -- 60,000 by humans. All of those events, by the way, are exceedingly rare -- though the human thing is a tad unsettling.

What about other terrifying monsters of nature, red in tooth and claw?

Let's look at mountain lions, which we have around here. According to CougarInfo.org -- whose stats are cited by state wildlife agencies -- there were a total of 88 cougar attacks, 20 of them fatal, in the U.S. and Canada from 1890 to 2004. That's considerably less than one attack, and a paltry 0.17 deaths, per year. In all of Colorado recorded history there are two confirmed human fatalities from lion attack.

Wolves have gotten the worst rap in history from humans looking for animals to fear and kill. We drove them nearly to extinction in North America. Then, when, with human assistance, they began a modest comeback, gun-totin' maniacs started wiping them out again. Wolves do take some livestock (though not much), but the "danger" they pose to humans is vanishingly small. (Coyotes? Two recorded fatal attacks in U.S. history. They've gotten bolder around here, it's true, but they are crafty, highly adaptable critters -- whose main predator is the wolf, which we have tried to exterminate.)

In the past century, there have been two -- count 'em -- two incidents of wolf attacks on humans, neither absolutely confirmed, according to livingwithwolves.org.

We also have our fair share of sharks in Boulder. Just last week staff at the Boulder Reservoir were chumming the west bay and brought up a 16-foot hammerhead. Sorry. I'm kind of hoping that winds up in a Google search somewhere and gets posted to Facebook as an amazing "fact."

But still: sharks! "Jaws"! One editor I know assures me that no matter what the odds, she will never surrender her fear of evolution's perfect ocean killing machine.

Yet the odds of shark attack, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History -- the state boasts more than half of confirmed U.S. shark attacks, far more than even Hawaii -- are incredibly low. There were a total of 1,038 confirmed shark attacks in the United States (including Hawaii) from 1670 to 2012. Of those, 19 were fatal. That's about three attacks and .05 fatalities per year, on average, but about one per year in recent history).

Your risk of death by shark attack during your lifetime, according to the National Safety Council, is one in 3,748,067. Meanwhile, your chance of dying from fireworks is one in 340,733; from lightning, one in 126,158; from a "firearms discharge," one in 7,059; from a bike accident, one in 4,982.

And we all stand a one in 108 chance during our lifetimes of being killed in car accidents, which snuff some 45,000 lives a year. In other words, you are about 45,000 times more likely to be killed driving to the trailhead than being killed by a bear; for lions, the number is 60,000; for wolves, it's 900,000. And driving to the beach is likewise about 45,000 times more dangerous than the sharks in the water that aren't going to attack and kill you. That's how foolish our fear of predators is.

To those who will, inevitably, protest, "It'll be on your head when a [insert scary animal here] kills grandma," I say: If the answer to the one-in-a-million chance that a bear will kill someone is to kill all bears in Boulder, then let's ban bikes, cars, guns, fireworks and sharks at the reservoir.

Yes, we humans draw these majestic, playful, not-very-threatening animals into danger when we don't secure our garbage. We don't have to let the city be overrun, but Colorado's shoot-first (or at least second) mentality is heavy-handed, unnecessary -- and frankly lazy -- as both statistics and the experiences of residents who enjoy bears attest.

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